With a title like Improvised Silence, Fort Worth's Hentai Improvising Orchestra is essentially bringing a blank canvas to The Cellar this Sunday, the first in a series of last Sunday of the month shows at the Fort Worth club, which will also feature Darrin Kobetich on sitar and Giri Akkaraju on percussion. What to expect? Well...
"I don't know what to expect on any of the Improvised Silence nights," HIO's Terry Horn sums up. "It all depends on how each of the performers feels that night. Hopefully, people will leave having experienced something both out of their comfort zone and something interesting. [Sunday] will have a more Eastern feel with the addition of sitar and Indian hand percussion but each event will be different."
Indeed, the next four months feature artists who are all just one degree off from each other, and Horn says the nature of the event will stay fluid enough to accommodate any situation. "If we can't find musicians who want to sit in, then it will just be an evening of HIO. We're also trying to find filmmakers, poets and dancers of like mind that would be willing to participate. I've hosted these before but this time it's going to be a bit different. We hope these events/performances are similar to what the Nihilist Spasm Band has been doing for decades up in Canada."
HIO is also in the process of recording new material to follow up last year's Sustrepo, though their process is a bit more unconventional than your typical band. So how does an improvisational group evolve, live or on record?
"Well, I can only speak on behalf of this group but we have no set rules," Horn says. "We may discuss beforehand how we want to approach the night and what instruments we want to work with, but generally we let the evening dictate what we do. Having said that, our approach has changed since the beginning; as we get more and more comfortable listening to each other, the sound changes. We also like to 'invite' musicians of like mind to sit in with us. We like to throw in that chance element to what we do."
